A Dangerous Age (19 page)

“What kind of book are you writing?” he asked her.

“Not like Aunt Anna’s, Daddy. I’m a journalist. I’ll write about the war. I don’t know what yet. Maybe vignettes from a newspaper editor’s point of view. Interviews with people whose lives are involved. When I get out to Nevada I’ll write about that. How we are using technology to stay on top, if we can stay on top, if we can train enough people to run the machines we make, our education system from the ground up, how fucking—excuse me—spoiled this country is and how we can get less spoiled before it’s too late. We will. I have faith in the United States. If you could stay long enough, we could go out to Nevada together and you could see what Bobby’s doing. He flies an airplane, sometimes helicopters, in Iraq, from a console in a building in Nevada. He’s a copilot now, but some of the smaller planes he flies alone. He’s good at it, Daddy. He told me the other day it wasn’t that much different from riding horses, rodeoing.”

“I’d like to see it.”

“We’ve got you a room fixed up.”

“I’ll just stay at a hotel, if you don’t mind, sweet sister. I don’t want to be on top of you here. I like your little house, though; it’s a friendly-looking place.”

W
HILE
O
LIVIA AND
Daniel were talking, Mary Lily set Daniel a place at the dining room table and brought in a bowl of stew, along with a second bowl of small red potatoes and fresh peas and carrots. To that she added homemade bread and butter and iced tea and a slice of caramel cake.

“Come get your supper,” she said, coming back into the living room. “I’ve got enough trouble getting Olivia to eat anything. I could use a person with a normal appetite.”

Daniel stood up and followed Mary Lily into the dining room, and Olivia joined them at the table.

“This looks mighty good,” Daniel said. “I’ve had this stew before when your momma made it for me in Tahlequah. What’s in this? I got a man at my house who can cook anything if he has the recipe.”

“It has beef and venison, and sometimes chicken or pork, and tomatoes and carrots and okra, if we can get it, and corn, which is why Momma only likes to make it when there is corn in the garden. It’s the fresh vegetables that make it so good. Momma doesn’t know a thing about organic gardening. She just never puts poison on anything. If she wants to keep worms off the tomatoes and corn, she puts bowls of beer under the plants. You think the Cherokees are bad to drink alcohol, you should see how many worms climb in those bowls to die.” Mary Lily started laughing, something she didn’t do that often in public. She mostly liked to laugh by herself or, lately, with Philip Whitehorse when they were alone.

“Stay here tonight, Daddy,” Olivia said. “We want a man in the house. You can go to a hotel tomorrow if you like, but I want you to be here in the morning.”

“Then I will,” Daniel agreed. “Now tell me everything you know about the work Bobby is doing. I’m interested in this. He just sits at a console? Is he alone with a copilot in a cubicle?”

“No, it’s a long, curved console like air traffic controllers use. I asked him that myself. He said it’s so simple, really. You have a screen and information from the people on the ground in Iraq and you just steer the plane and shoot and release rockets, and it’s just exactly like a video game, and the very best person doing it with him is a man from Tulsa who misspent his youth playing video games. . . .”

A
N HOUR LATER
, Daniel was propped up on pillows in the guest bedroom, reading the information Olivia had pulled up on the computer from Boeing and Northrop Grumman and all the companies that were building the planes and helicopters and guidance systems of the drone aircraft. Before he went to sleep, Daniel had put in a call to his stockbroker in Charlotte to sell his Pfizer stock and invest the money in some of the companies who were building the planes. “Call me back early,” he said in the message. “And why in the hell didn’t Merrill Lynch mention this to me?”

A
S SOON AS HER
father went to bed, Olivia scooted back up the stairs on her derriere and climbed into her bed and was just getting settled when the phone rang. It was Big Jim Walters. “Are you all right?” he asked.

“I’m fine. I’ll be done with this bed thing next week, I think. What’s up?”

“You need to write a catch-up editorial on the Lynndie
England thing. I’ve got phone numbers for her lawyers. I had it sent to your computer.”

“What about the column I was going to write while I’m gone? Why can’t it be the first column?”

“All right, if you want to start off with something that’s going to piss off half the readers.”

“It won’t be inflammatory. I’ve been doing research. She’s not very bright, Jim. She was in a mechanics’ backup group in the fucking reserves. She’s from West Virginia. What in the hell were they doing sending this untrained, not very bright kid to guard Iraqi insurgents in a makeshift prison? When will bigger heads roll? Why did they make this pint-size, pregnant woman the fall guy for the whole Mideast shit storm?”

“That sounds inflammatory.”

“Well, I’ll tone it down.”

“They demoted the general in charge.”

“A reserve unit general trained for combat support duty. This has legs for a column, Jim. I’ll be careful with it. Just the facts as I can find them.”

“All right. Go ahead. When can you do it?”

“Now. I’ll send it over in the morning.”

“We miss you here.”

“No, you don’t. The paper looks great. Who’s running things?”

“I am. I’m too lazy to look for anyone this week.”

O
LIVIA PICKED UP
her laptop and began to type. “Don’t worry,” she told her baby. “You don’t need my brain, do you? You’ve got the womb and access to the blood supply and I ate dinner like a pig, so you should be okay. Go to sleep and grow some bones and shoulders like your daddy’s, but don’t grow my skin. I want you dark enough to be chief someday. Don’t come out looking like some Irish half-breed.”

Olivia started playing with first lines for her column: “Why in the name of God did we send a reserve unit of people trained to be
mechanics
into the heart of Iraq to be
prison guards
, outnumbered two hundred to one, under the command of a man whose civilian job had been to run a prison, and expect this reserve unit of mechanics, without adequate training, to have the slightest notion of how to protect their own lives in this dangerous situation, much less extract information from their prisoners, all of this in a prison where Saddam Hussein had killed and brutally tortured and raped thousands of men and women for years? Imagine the karma, imagine the smells, imagine the scene.

“So the main fall guy is going to be a five-foot-tall, twenty-two-year-old girl from West Virginia, who became pregnant with the baby of her superior officer, the ex–prison commander. She is the one to go to jail for the sins of the world? She is to be the sacrifice? We should thank her for going to Iraq, for continuing to
breathe
and survive while this went on around her.

“Where is she in the meantime? Is she with her six-month-old son? Does she have friends to help her? The army doesn’t
want to answer these questions, but I’m going to keep on asking them.”

Olivia printed the pages, set them on the table beside her bed, and went back to the computer. She began putting together a list of ideas for columns.

How the Baltic nations sang for their freedom at the end of the cold war.

Conversations in New York in the late 1980s with a chauffeur who had been the Latvian minister of materials under the Soviet Union.

Monday: 8 Killed, 150 wounded in Baghdad.

Tuesday: 40 killed, 69 wounded, including a four-year-old child. Where are the suicide bombers coming from? What can we do to stop them?

Will Bobby’s drone airplanes be patrolling the Syrian border?

North Koreans ready for nuclear test. North Korea is China’s pit bull, contained for how long?

Floods in Idaho. Fires in Minnesota. The Kentucky Derby, what a bunch of bored rich people, what a crowded, unhappy-looking place. A young woman married to an older man who had a horse in the race cried. She cried with her little face-lifted face pressed into his two-thousand-dollar designer jacket while her teenage stepchildren stood sadly by.

Is anyone raising children to know they are part of the human race and that they have to work to keep the free nations of the world strong and free? I think not. I will raise my sons and daughters to dream of being valuable to their fellow men.

Got to call Tallulah tomorrow and see how she’s getting along at Vanderbilt. Got to call Susan and thank her for being a physician when she could have lived on her daddy’s money. Got to stay in touch with valuable people doing hard work; got to shore them up and set an example by not quitting my job.

She stopped typing. Oh, shit, she thought. Well, I’ll call Jim tomorrow and talk to him. He’s standing by. He knows it’s the baby calling the shots. You calling the shots down there, little buddy? Well, listen, it won’t do any good for me to stay home and wait on you hand and foot if the world you have to live in for the next hundred years is in bad shape. So get ready for day care. It’s good; you get to catch colds and practice your social skills.

O
LIVIA HAD JUST
started writing a clean second draft of the column when the phone rang. “It’s Jim,” the caller said. “Hang on to your chair. Get this, Olivia, just in on the AP. The woman general in charge of Abu Ghraib is being demoted to colonel. You heard that, I suppose? She was arrested for shoplifting in Florida right before they shipped her to Iraq. I’ll have to check it before we can print it, but it’s on the AP. I’ve got a call into Reuters.”

“Find out what she stole,” Olivia answered. “That’s the column. Plus, think how bored they must be on those bases when there is no war or they aren’t being sent to a war. Would you join the army or run for office, or would I or any sane person not driven by dire need or an ego so out of whack it can’t be
controlled? We’d be lost if it weren’t for the young men and women from small towns who are brainwashed in churches or by servicemen fathers who came back alive or barely wounded and got pensions they like.”

“Keep writing, Olivia. But remember, just the facts, and ones we can prove. Don’t try to make points and don’t blame or judge. And no, I wouldn’t run for office, but I was in the navy during the Vietnam War. I’m surprised you didn’t know that. I joined when I was seventeen. It was over before I had to go to a war zone, and I got an education courtesy of the United States government. I’m grateful for it.”

“Why did you join the navy?”

“I don’t know. I guess I wanted to see the ocean.”

C
ARL WAS NEVER AT HOME
. He had been assigned to the Pentagon, where his work was to create recruitment campaigns in the South and lower Midwest. At least three days a week he flew out early in the morning and returned after midnight. He was the leader of a three-man group that went to high schools and colleges and lectured and answered questions about the marines. He was cheerful and intelligent and people liked him. He looked like the athlete he had been; on the flights he even worked out with pulleys and hand weights to keep up the appearance of perfect health. On days when he was at home, he rose at dawn and was at his office by eight.

“I’m a paper soldier,” he told Brian when he talked to him on the phone. “I’ve never been in a war zone. The two men who work with me have been everywhere. One was in the Gulf War; the other man was in the invasion of Afghanistan when he was twenty. I’m just the upper-middle-class pretty boy.”

“What’s the problem, Bro?” Brian asked. “You want me to shoot off your chin so you won’t feel guilty? I get a lot of sympathy for it, I’ll admit that. Winifred’s my slave if she thinks I’m in pain.”

“You still taking pills for it?”

“No. I threw them away. They fuck up my head. You can ignore the pain once you learn how. They taught me these breathing tricks. I wish I’d known them when we were playing ball. Hey, I’ve got a Little League team. Did I tell you that? Olivia Hand’s husband, Bobby Tree, is out here. He’s a good man. He’s flying the unmanned Fire Scouts and training on the Predators. Anyway, he’s helping with the team. We’ve got a tournament in July. You ought to come out and see some of the games.”

“I got to hang up, Bro. They’re sending me to Fort Smith, Arkansas. We’re cleaning up in Arkansas lately. A kid just out of basic training took his sister to her prom dance in Hot Springs last month. He was wearing his dress uniform. The next week we had ten recruits. Ten, baby, and three of them were young women. When’s this tournament your team’s in?”

“Seventeenth to the twentieth.”

“Maybe we’ll come.”

L
OUISE WAS WRITING
her cousin Winifred a letter. She had started to send an e-mail, then decided her message was too personal to trust to a system that was monitored by the Pentagon and the CIA.

Dear Winnie,

Do you know that our children will be almost double first cousins? My momma had three double first cousins. Momma and her sister Ariane (Crystal Weiss’s mother) had an older sister named Margaret, and she married the brother of my grandfather James Hand, whose name was Niall, like our uncle, only all of them moved to New England and went to Unitarian colleges and some of them were ministers. Anyway, they never had much to do with any of our family except to write to Momma now and then. Uncle Niall is doing a family tree to give to all of us next Christmas. So they are all in it.